Opinion

At 5:30 a.m., it was still dark when we — five cops, two city council members, and one city manager — took off from City Hall on bikes. Within a few minutes, the sun started creeping over the mountains, showing us the muted colors of the old adobes in the nearby neighborhood.

I’m a big fan of vacations on the cheap, which is good, since I’ve seldom been able to afford anything first-class. Besides, top-dollar travel often overlooks the best stuff to see. Several years ago, when my family was younger and we were fairly new to the Land of Enchantment, we decided to take a New Mexico-centric vacation. My wife and I, along with our two daughters, got into our four-door sedan early one summer morning and left our northern New Mexico home in search of wonderment, which we found at just about every stop.

Let’s start with the good news: New Mexico is number one on an important ranking. We have the nation’s lowest property taxes, and they’ve been the lowest for a long time.

I’ve thought more about what Jesus would do in the last five months than I have since those bracelets were all the rage in the late ‘90s. Heading to an event this week, I realized I was going to be awkwardly early instead of fashionably late, so I took a detour to an area where homeless encampments had frustrated residents and restaurants nearby.

Because I’m a professional practitioner of the pedagogical arts (known in some parts as fancy book learnin’), I’m privileged to enjoy a Spring Break holiday that usually falls during the same week my semi-grown daughters are also out of school. Back in the good old days when the girls still spoke to me with actual words, we would spend our Spring Breaks together– playing at the park, riding bikes, or sharing the trauma of a Disney character’s parental death scene.